Outcomes for people or ideology for activists?
A few weeks ago in Adelaide two young Vietnamese students were suddenly
taken from my local community into held detention after receiving a letter from
the Immigration department stating that their “community detention was no
longer in the public interest”.
These young men were 16 years old and living in Australia as unaccompanied
children seeking refuge from religious and political persecution. A little over a
week before immigration officers and federal police showed up at their house just after they got home from school, while still in their uniforms – and told them
to put their belongings in a black plastic bag to be taken to Inverbrackie
detention centre they’d received another letter telling them they had 6 weeks to
put together legal information proving their identity.
Six weeks had become a matter of days.
At 3am the next morning, the two children were again suddenly removed, taken
from Inverbrackie, placed on separate planes, each accompanied by four Serco
guards, flown via different cities and then both arriving the next day to be held in
Whickham Point detention centre in Darwin.
15 other young asylum seekers immediately went into hiding, and still haven’t
been found. The two Woodville High students originally removed have also
subsequently escaped from detention.
I’ve been supporting the incredible campaign that’s been spearheaded by
students at Woodville High School appalled at the treatment of their friends. It’s
been beyond inspiring to watch. The students and I worked on having their local
City Council pass a motion calling on the Federal government to return their
friends. They’ve done huge amounts of media. The South Australian School
Principal’s Association has formally complained to the Human Rights
Commission and hundreds of people attended a rally organized by the students
at South Australia’s Parliament House.
A couple of moments stand out to me along this journey. The first was at a
meeting of school principals, all of who have students on community detention in
their schools. Two students living in community detention came to the meeting
to talk about the situation from their perspectives. They talked about the age redetermination interviews that were happening throughout the recent school
holidays and I spoke on the phone to one student who went into a meeting with
Immigration 15 and came out 18, and instructed by the immigration Department
that this meant she was no longer able to attend school the following Monday.
We discussed reports that immigration officers were not allowing these minors
to take a support person into their interviews, and were cancelling interviews
when third parties were insisting on staying to witness them.
The longer we talked, and the more I heard, the more I realised that our
authorities are increasingly behaving like the very authorities these kids have
fled from – and that this behaviour is now teaching a generation of students in
my local community to distrust our institutions and legal process.
There’s something that’s certainly not in the public interest.
During the meeting with the Principals I received an email from the immigration
Department, a “community update” informing people who support asylum
seekers that those who had been unsuccessful in their claim for refugee status
would now be on a pathway to removal and that we should encourage our clients
to cooperate with this process.
It seemed relevant to the meeting that we were having and I read it out. The two
community detention students we had with us were already emotional but I saw
the fear that this email caused and wished immediately that I hadn’t revealed it. I
sat with them afterwards and talked them through the detail and we worked out
a system for them to call myself or other support people when authorities
showed up suddenly or when otherwise faced with something they didn’t
understand.
I saw these community detention students again at the rally at Parliament House.
They wanted to attend the rally in solidarity with their friends, but also to hide
their identities. Some wore masks and others stood behind banners to make sure
they were safe.
Pause to consider this.
Children in Australia, here without their parents, were scared of what would
happen to them if our authorities could identify their faces.
I’ll never forget looking back and seeing them in tears as I took to the stage to
soliloquize about the injustice and unnecessary cruelty of our asylum seeker
system.
And after both incidents I couldn’t help but think to myself…
I get to go home after this.
I’ll drive home, pick up my kids and take them to a playground. I’ll make plans
with my wife about what we’ll do tomorrow, next week, in a few years.
I have these same moments when I’m with my friends at the Welcome Centre in
Adelaide and we’re having a great time playing soccer, smoking shisha, sharing
food – and then they tell me how they haven’t been able to sleep for weeks
because they’re wondering what’s going to happen with their visa; uncertain if
they’ll ever see their family again; if they’ll be the next people to be suddenly redetained.
And I realise again that for all my fine rhetoric and my passionate campaigning I
get to go home and go on with my life. I don’t live the nightmare.
And so I spend a lot of time thinking to myself that we, the people on our side,
must do better.
We’ve got to do better.
Because it’s not an ideological position we’re fighting for. It’s not left versus
right, or refugee supporters versus racists. It’s not a progressive versus
conservative political debate where victory can be measured by making
someone on the other side back down, resign from their Ministry, or by
signatures on a petition or hits on our website.
“Winning” isn’t measured by having all the statistics that prove your position, or
in trending on twitter. The “win” isn’t found in “gotcha” moments or in gaffes
made by folks on the other team.
When those things become our goal, we’ve forgotten what our advocacy is all
about.
When we think we’ve achieved something worthwhile by making someone in
power know how hated and despised he or she is, we’ve completely lost sight of
what really matters.
We need to measure our victories by the amount of difference we make in the
lives of real people. By the changes we make to the systems that cause the
suffering that moved us in the first place.
I believe that compassionate Australians need to have two concurrent strategies
running.
Firstly, we all want a situation where asylum seekers, refugees and other new
arrivals are humanized, treated with dignity and respect and where mandatory
and indefinite detention is brought to an end.
We dream of a day when the ability to inspire fear and administer cruelty are no
longer used as measurements of good leadership.
We’d all love to live in a country where fairness is extended to asylum seekers
and one that’s internationally renowned for our welcome instead of our
brutality.
We want an Australia where our population would not tolerate the unspeakable
suffering we mete out to people utterly disempowered by our system.
Welcome to Australia, the organisation I work for, has often said that we’ve not
achieved our vision when asylum seekers are released from detention, but when
the heart of the nation has changed such that the electorate would not tolerate
leaders who use asylum seekers as expendable pawns in their political games.
But the reality is this – that’s a very long way away. It’s not that it’s unachievable,
but it is that it’s a marathon. Perhaps ten marathons.
The reality of today’s Australia is that we can have someone brutally murdered
and eighty other people horrifically injured in a detention centre and the general
public let it slide. We can have doctors, psychiatrists, detention centre staff, the
Human Rights Commissioner, child development specialists and so many others
publically declare that we’re involved in state sanctioned child abuse or that our
system is akin to torture and the majority of Australians say “not my problem”.
We can have 157 people including 37 children on a prison ship at sea for a
month and it’s all too complex for people to really worry about.
Here’s the facts – we’ve told Australians about the damage being done to asylum
seekers for over a decade and our leaders still know that cruelty and fear wins
them elections. They’d rather prove themselves tough and harsh than
compassionate and welcoming because that’s what the public is voting for.
So we’re along way from ultimate victory. That doesn’t mean we stop.
But I do want to suggest that we need a second, parallel strategy to the essential
task of giving Australia a heart transplant.
We need a strategy that achieves incremental positive change for the asylum
seekers we care so much about. A strategy that doesn’t abandon the long-term
goal of changing the will of the electorate, but that recognises current social and
political realities and works for the good of asylum seekers themselves who
personally bear the brunt of those realities.
We need to ensure we’re not sacrificing people’s lives for the sake of our
ideological purity.
That’s exactly what we blame the other side for.
At the end of a day when we’ve finished campaigning for a Minister to be sacked,
for the immediate closure of offshore detention centres and the end of
mandatory detention we get to home at night.
The Vietnamese kids in hiding, the hundreds of people suffering on Manus
Island, the children on Nauru, the mothers of children born into detention
centres… they don’t have time to wait for the arrival of the utopia we’re trying to
build.
And while we don’t get to forget the stories we’ve been told, the things we’ve
seen in detention centres, or the ongoing anguish of our friends… we get to go
home at night knowing it will remain our home for many years to come.
Instead of what often boils down to an “all or nothing” approach to asylum
seeker policy, it’s time we collectively rallied around achievable, incremental
changes, building smart campaigns that take into account current social and
political realities, that take the time to understand the political narratives of the
major parties and that, most importantly, have making lives better for asylum
seekers today as the driving focus.
We’ve all seen what happened in the climate change debate.
People sacrificed outcomes for ideology and so we’ve ended up with nothing
instead of something.
Incremental positive change was sacrificed on the altar of ideology.
When we do this in our sector, it’s the people our ideology exists to benefit that
continue to suffer.
One of our key challenges is the need to re-frame the debate away from the
onshore versus offshore processing dichotomy we’ve been caught in.
Not because I believe in offshore processing or because I’ve bought into the lies
about the suitability of those centres for people. As demonstrated by inquiry
after inquiry, I think they’re unconscionable hellholes entirely unsuitable for
anyone let alone children.
However, for as long as our detention system is secretive, unaccountable and
without any transparency the location of a centre is not the primary concern of
an asylum seeker. We could have a centre in the centre of Melbourne and if no
one was allowed to see inside, if there was no independent oversight and no
accountability anything could be happening to the people held there.
Further, it’s not so much the conditions or the location that the people I spend
time with every day say destroys their mental health or robs them of hope. It’s
the lack of information about their future and their refugee status application;
it’s the denial of fair process and legal support, and, as a way of summarizing all
of these issues it’s the indefiniteness of it all.
If you’ve fled Burma because you’ve seen your village burnt down and your
friends and family killed it’s not the conditions on Nauru that will break you.
It’s the realization that you could remain there forever; it’s the Kafka-esque
nature of the system you’ve found yourself in.
We need to think about what is realistically achievable in the short term that will
make lives better for the people we care about. I suggest that that far more life
changing from the perspective of an asylum seeker would be transparent centres
with independent oversight and swift, fair processing of claims than a long,
unwinnable argument about the location of their indefinite incarceration.
Put bluntly, being locked up in the desert in outback Australia for years on end in
a centre without transparency is little different than being locked up on an island
for years in a centre without transparency.
People who visited Woomera detention centre at the height of the trauma there
would know this to be true.
And so, it’s not only the government that needs to do better when it comes to
asylum seekers. We need to.
We need to do better to shape public opinion for the sake of our future.
We need to do better to change the lives of asylum seekers for the sake of today.
We need to be less interested in our ideology and more interested in the lives of
the people our ideology is intended to help.
We need to be less interested in stirring up the passions of the people already on
our side and more interested in having respectful conversations with people who
are not on our side.
We need to be less interested in the latest breaking news or the newest policy
paper and more interested in strategically planning the next realistically
achievable outcome for real people.
We need to approach all our campaigns, all our policy development, from the
perspective that while we can go home tonight secure in our future and our
safety, the children who’ve fled from high schools in Adelaide, the thirty
thousand people whose claims have still not been processed in Australia, and the
kids we’re abusing on Nauru and Christmas Island do not.
Brad Chilcott’s panel address at the “We’ve Boundless Plains to Share”
Justice and International Mission Convention